Alexandra Ettler is working as European Trainings Manager for Ralph Lauren.

How many people are working in your department?

The entire department includes 124 employees, who are divided in subdivisions and regions by country. My area of responsibility is the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) and Scandinavia. Hence I have the fuctional direction of 18 merchandise coordinators (MC’s).

What are your primary tasks?

Giving feed back to the store visit reports (prepared by the mc's) This helps them to detect mistakes and also to receive credit for their work

Cooperation with sales, RRD and brand planning to ensure the merchandise goods on the areas

Calculating area capacities for store openings

Doing one to one trainings to improve the performance of the merchandise coordinators

Creating newsletters to forward the latest information of the presentation of the goods to the point of sale

Developing training modules (once a season we offer depertment trainings for all the eruopean MC’s. Concerning this we prepare presentations and completely organise the training, which lasts several days)

What ist the biggest challenge in your job?

To imply and maintain a central theme.

What are the best parts of your job and what is more difficult?

+ The success on the sales areas is visual noticeable after the training

+ Tracing the positive development of the MC’s

+ The positive sales increase on the areas

- At Ralph Lauren we have a very extensive structue which on the one hand ensures the obvious task allocation in such a big company but on the other hand dicisions can be very long-winded.

I did my Mittlere Reife (O-Level) and decided to become a retail saleswomen. My coach was the buyer of the company with an international travel activity that inspired me. Because of me moving to Flensburg I had to postpone my plans because Flensburg wasn’t really a fashion capital in the 80s which offered a vacational development for me.

When I came back to munich as a mum after a few years, I worked part-time as a fashion adviser in the new opened splendid Escada Store in the Theatinerstraße. There I got to know the job of a merchandiser that wasn’t yet known in the early 90s in Germany. Because of my creativity and my visual intuition I quickly gained admission to that department and within a minimum of time supervised the DACH region as a merchandiser.

As the headquarter of Escada our department was responsible for the worldwide visual appearance of the brand. I always wanted to travel the world and with this goal I quickly assumed the direction of the department and operated globally. After 8 years of intensive traveling I decicded to step back a little bit and assumed the direction of two Escada flagship stores in munich. After 3 years I got the opportunity to implement my knowledge in the Retail Academy of Escada. This was an intern training center which trained the employees globally with regard to the collection, product and sales. With the insolvency of Escada this deparment was closed and I applied for the job at Ralph Lauren.

How did you apply?

A fiend of mine told me about the vacancies at Ralph Lauren. After sending my CV I passed an intensive application process. Because of me being part of a London based department I was invited to London and had to give proof of my visual eye in a test.

What could you recommend to people who want to work at Ralph Lauren?

When we recruit merchandiser we set great value upon existing merchandising knowledge but it isn’t a requirement. It is important to have a visual intuition and the affinity to the brand. Everything else will be trained.

Polo Ralph Lauren is now one of the most known companies in the world. Today the company runs 280 stores worldwide and distributed their collections to several different lines.

The brand was an innovator for lifestyle advertising and was the first to create stores the customers were able to immerge into that special lifestyle. Internationally Ralph Lauren was pioneer in the field of visual merchandising and served as inspiration for many other brands.